Hackers and other nefarious types tend to hide their forums and marketplaces in one of two ways. The first relies on the widely used Tor software to anonymize traffic as it passes around the Internet and prevent it being tracked. This is known as the "dark net." Another option is to use websites hosted on the open portion of the Web but not indexed by search engines. This is the "deep net," and can be equally hard to navigate. To monitor hacker activity in these places, Nunes and co developed a crawler to gather information from HTML pages hosted on the deep net and the dark net. Obviously, a key part of this work is to point the crawler at the best starting pages, a task that must be done by humans familiar with these pages.

We have covered here at Equities many times the rising risk of cyber attacks and how new companies are coming out with unique products to prevent security hacks. One of the new companies we are following is SecBI (Security Business Intelligence). This Israel-based company was founded in 2014 under the leadership from experts at RSA. The company is headquartered in Be'er-Sheba as a part of the JCP Cyberlabs. SecBI's cyber-detection platform that combines advanced intelligent thinking-machine technology, cyber-security expertise and user feedback into a superior threat detector.

A robot has been detained by police at a political rally in Moscow, with authorities attempting to handcuff the machine. The rally was for Valery Kalachev, a candidate for the Russian Parliament, who had rented the robot for his campaign. Police have not confirmed why they detained the machine named Promobot, but local media was reporting the company behind the robot said police were called because it was "recording voters' opinions on [a] variety of topics for further processing and analysis by the candidate's team". A Promobot representative suggested it was detained because "perhaps this action wasn't authorised". Mr Kalachev has featured the robot at previous campaign stops.

Artificial Intelligence (AI), long the subject of science fiction, is now becoming more and more widespread and is seen as an increasingly important computer science across multiple industries. In Financial Services in particular, Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing is increasingly used today to make sense of big, complex data in a wide range of areas. One such area is regulatory compliance. The use of AI – particularly Natural Language Understanding (NLU), a subset of Natural Language Processing – can help firms to realise a number of benefits, including improving the speed and efficiency with which they achieve compliance, and making that compliance much more robust. As we've seen over just the last couple of years with the introduction of MiFID I & II, UCITS, AIFMD and the like, there is a constant stream of documents being issued by regulators, which can each run to hundreds, or even thousands, of pages.

The Master Algorithm is a book about Machine Learning. But while it claims to be about its future, the focus is more on its past. Domingos' gives us a tour of the five different Machine Learning fiefdoms (Evolutionaries, Connectionists, Symbolists, Bayesians, and Analogizers), how they connect, and what their histories are. At times the discussion gets a little too technical. Sentences like "...we can view what SVMs do with kernels, support vectors, and weights as mapping the data to a higher-dimensional space and finding a maximum-margin hyperplane in that space" (pg 196) make it clear Mr. Domingos is no Malcolm Gladwell.

NEW YORK – Five years after Anwar al-Awlaki was killed by an American drone strike, he keeps inspiring acts of terror. Investigators say a bomb that rocked New York a week ago, injuring more than two dozen people, was the latest in a long line of incidents in which the attackers were inspired by al-Awlaki, an American imam who became an al-Qaida propagandist. Federal terrorism charges against the bombing suspect, Ahmad Khan Rahami, say a bloodstained notebook -- found on him after he engaged in a shootout with police in New Jersey and was arrested -- included passages praising al-Awlaki. And Rahami's father has said he went to the FBI two years ago in part because he was concerned about his son's admiration for al-Awlaki and the time he spent watching his videos advocating jihad, or holy war. Terror experts say al-Awlaki remains a dangerous inciter of homegrown terror.

By building on a recently introduced genetic-inspired attribute-based conceptual framework for safety risk analysis, we propose a novel methodology to compute construction univariate and bivariate construction safety risk at a situational level. Our fully data-driven approach provides construction practitioners and academicians with an easy and automated way of extracting valuable empirical insights from databases of unstructured textual injury reports. By applying our methodology on an attribute and outcome dataset directly obtained from 814 injury reports, we show that the frequency-magnitude distribution of construction safety risk is very similar to that of natural phenomena such as precipitation or earthquakes. Motivated by this observation, and drawing on state-of-the-art techniques in hydroclimatology and insurance, we introduce univariate and bivariate nonparametric stochastic safety risk generators, based on Kernel Density Estimators and Copulas. These generators enable the user to produce large numbers of synthetic safety risk values faithfully to the original data, allowing safetyrelated decision-making under uncertainty to be grounded on extensive empirical evidence. Just like the accurate modeling and simulation of natural phenomena such as wind or streamflow is indispensable to successful structure dimensioning or water reservoir management, we posit that improving construction safety calls for the accurate modeling, simulation, and assessment of safety risk. The underlying assumption is that like natural phenomena, construction safety may benefit from being studied in an empirical and quantitative way rather than qualitatively which is the current industry standard. Finally, a side but interesting finding is that attributes related to high energy levels and to human error emerge as strong risk shapers on the dataset we used to illustrate our methodology.

Trucking paid for Scott Spindola to take a road trip down the coast of Spain, climb halfway up Machu Picchu, and sample a Costa Rican beach for two weeks. The 44-year-old from Covina now makes up to 70,000 per year, with overtime, hauling goods from the port of Long Beach. He has full medical coverage and plans to drive until he retires. But in a decade, his big rig may not have any need for him. Carmaking giants and ride-sharing upstarts racing to put autonomous vehicles on the road are dead set on replacing drivers, and that includes truckers.

Transport ministers from the Group of Seven advanced economies agreed Sunday to strengthen cooperation in the railway and airline sectors as they wrapped up their three-day meeting in the resort town of Karuizawa, Nagano Prefecture. Prior to the conclusion of the gathering, ministers from Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States plus the European Union adopted a declaration Saturday pledging to reinforce international cooperation in creating safety regulations to promote self-driving cars. The conference was the last of the ministerial meetings related to May's G-7 leaders' Ise-Shima summit in Mie Prefecture. "We will cooperate with each other and exercise leadership to support the early commercialization of automated and connected vehicle technologies," the declaration adopted at the Saturday meeting said. "We obtained a common understanding to make efforts in the same direction to create regulation frameworks that (will) tend to vary depending on region," transport minister Keiichi Ishii told a news conference after the meeting.

A startup technology company, AppZen, has introduced new technology that is leveraging artificial intelligence to examine expense reports for signs of fraud. "We are an AI company and we've built a solution for back-office automation," AppZen CEO Anant Kale told me. "As part of that, our first focus area is back office expense processing, which is essentially how to find compliance issues within expenses. We are focusing on automating the research and reasoning that human auditors do today and putting it into machines." Kale noted that most companies don't really audit anywhere near all of their expense reports.